{"id":73689,"date":"2025-06-24T13:29:40","date_gmt":"2025-06-24T20:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=73689"},"modified":"2025-06-24T13:29:40","modified_gmt":"2025-06-24T20:29:40","slug":"for-lgbtq-americans-pride-is-personal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=73689","title":{"rendered":"For LGBTQ Americans, Pride is Personal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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What does it mean to be LGBTQ as this year\u2019s Pride Month comes amid polarization and rights rollbacks nationwide?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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What does it mean to be LGBTQ as this year\u2019s Pride Month comes amid polarization and rights rollbacks nationwide?<\/p>\n

This month alone, the Trump administration announced it would stop funding an LGBTQ suicide prevention hotline that had serviced over 1.3 million youth since 2022; the Supreme Court upheld a ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors; and, in a win for LGBTQ advocates, a federal judge blocked the administration\u2019s order to refuse to issue passports to transgender and nonbinary Americans.<\/p>\n

About 9 million US adults, or 3.8%, identify as lesbian or gay (1.7%), bisexual (1.8%) or transgender (0.3%).<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember a time when we were completely repressed, hidden and shoved into a closet, and that did not stop us from coming out,\u201d said Helen Zia, journalist and founder of\u00a0The Vincent Chin Institute<\/a>, at a Friday, June 20 American Community Media briefing. \u201cIf you completely pretend that there\u2019s no such thing as queer people, that\u2019s not going to stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cNot long ago, even today, even in activist communities, many people believe that it\u2019s a white thing, that it\u2019s not something in our communities, it\u2019s a white disease,\u201d she continued. \u201cBut it\u2019s not possible to remove our identities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Describing one experience while growing up as an Asian American feminist activist in New Jersey in her early 20s, Zia said \u201cI was invited to a meeting of Asian, Black and Latino activists. When I got there, I was told to sit in the middle of the room. Everybody else was around me in a semi-circle \u2026 and they said \u2018Helen, we\u2019ve noticed that you\u2019re hanging out with a lot of lesbians, and we need to know if you\u2019re a lesbian, because homosexuality is a sign of of petty bourgeois White self-indulgence, and it has no business being in our communities of color.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI had never had a girlfriend,\u201d she explained. \u201cAt that time, things were so invisible and demonized that in my mind, I was going, \u2018I don\u2019t know. What does that mean? How do I know I\u2019m a lesbian?\u2019 So I looked at all my fellow activists, and I said \u2018No, I\u2019m not.\u2019 And they were like, \u2018Oh, good, fine. Next agenda item.\u2019 I was just an agenda item for them \u2026 but for me, it was stepping into the closet and slamming the door shut. I didn\u2019t go to any more women\u2019s movement meetings.\u201d<\/p>\n

What has particularly boosted general acceptance of LGBTQ people since then \u201cis when people realize that their own family members, people they love, might be LGBTQ,\u201d Zia continued. \u201cMarriage is not just two people getting married. It\u2019s two families coming together \u2026 and I think that\u2019s one code that people do understand: If you\u2019re going to insult my family member, you insult all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Describing his upbringing in Sacramento, California to Catholic Mexican immigrant parents, journalist and author Richard Rodriguez said \u201cMy siblings converted my parents \u2026 My brother, a lawyer in San Francisco, was encouraging my coming out long, long ago, and my sister was my date when I wanted somebody to go to plays and musicals with. When she found the man that she would marry, there was a sense that I had lost her, but he ended up being the person who married me (and my partner).\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cMy unease with the term \u2018pride\u2019 is that I don\u2019t feel that I chose to be gay. I feel that I was chosen to be gay,\u201d he continued. \u201cAnd now, it is an incredibly dangerous time. There\u2019s no doubt in my mind that civil marriage for same-sex couples could be reversed. We saw that with\u00a0Roe v. Wade<\/em>\u00a0\u2026 and we\u2019re seeing queer people who have sought asylum being picked up to be deported back to countries where they could be killed for who they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the 238 Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador last March, for instance, was gay makeup artist Andry Hernandez Romero. In late May, a federal judge also ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a gay Guatemalan asylum seeker who was wrongfully deported to Mexico.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the AIDS crisis, the activists had a saying, \u2018silence equals death\u2019 \u2014 and that\u2019s what\u2019s happening now. We cannot afford to be silent,\u201d Rodriguez added.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my South Asian community, it is very commonly understood that our children are not queer or trans. This is someone else\u2019s problem \u2026 so our children wait until they\u2019re safe outside the home as adults before they come out,\u201d explained Aruna Rao, executive director of nationwide South Asian LGBTQ resource network\u00a0Desi Rainbow<\/a>, which she founded in New Jersey during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

Rao said that a decade ago, when her child came out as transgender, \u201cthere wasn\u2019t a lot of information out there for immigrant parents. I found myself the only brown face at support meetings and I felt like people didn\u2019t really see all of me \u2026 That led me to think that I could not be the only Indian American mother of a queer and trans child. There must be thousands of these parents. Why did I not have a community of people that I could lean on?\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cMy child did not come out to his dad. He told me to keep his identity a secret, and I tried for as long as I could, until he went away to college. At that point, it felt like the secret was too heavy to bear. And so I did tell my husband,\u201d she continued. \u201cHe told my son: \u2018You know I love you. I don\u2019t understand any of this. You can tell me what you want me to do or say, but never doubt that I love you.\u2019 That was a beautiful moment, because it led our family forward without having to worry about reactions.\u201d<\/p>\n

LGBT people are over twice as likely than heterosexual people to have a mental health disorder in their lifetime, and two and a half times as likely to experience depression, anxiety and substance misuse in particular.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of these mental health issues are caused by being LGBTQ or coming out,\u201d said Rao. It\u2019s due to the stigma and discrimination that LGBTQ people face. The immigrant parents that I work with deal with a lot of the same stigma \u2026 so the family ends up being almost as isolated as LGBTQ people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our immigrant communities, extended family and our chosen family of friends are crucial to our children\u2019s coming out process, because their acceptance will make or break a child\u2019s ability to live authentically,\u201d she continued, adding that key to pride for both LGBTQ Americans and those seeking to support them \u201cis peer support, talking to others who have walked in their shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Jun 24, 2025 What...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73690,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73689\/revisions\/73690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}